Esther Summerson

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Esther Summerson
Esther Summerson by Hablot Browne
First appearance	Bleak House
Created by	Charles Dickens
In-universe information
Gender	Female
Family	Lady Dedlock (Mother) Captain James Hawdon (Nemo) (Father) Miss Barbary (Aunt) Alan Woodcourt (Husband)

Esther Summerson is a character in Bleak House, an 1853 novel by Charles Dickens. She also serves as one of the novel's two narrators; half the book is written from her perspective. It is the only example of a double narrative in Dickens and the first person female voice may have been influenced by the example of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, published in 1847.

As a baby, she was brought up by Miss Barbary, a woman she knew as her godmother; this woman was in reality the sister of her unmarried mother, the future Lady Dedlock, and thus Esther's aunt, "in fact if not in law." When her aunt dies suddenly, Esther's care is taken over by the philanthropist, John Jarndyce, who arranges for Esther to receive a sound education as a future governess. When Ada Clare and Richard Carstone, two wards in Chancery, need a home, John Jarndyce welcomes them to Bleak House, his home near St Albans. Esther joins the establishment as Ada's companion and the family's housekeeper. Over the course of Esther's stay at Bleak House, she learns more about her family, contracts smallpox, which results in facial scarring, and learns the identity of her mother, who dies not long after. She becomes engaged to Mr. Jarndyce, her guardian, but ultimately marries a doctor named Allan Woodcourt who had fallen in love with her over the course of the novel.^[1]